Before the new version of our wireframing tool will be introduced, we decided to change the pricing model.

From now, upgrade licenses are for free. In other words, if you buy the Devhand SketchIt license now, you will get all upgrades for $0! Isn’t it cool?

The main product price is $69. There is also the quantity discount. If you buy 5 or more licenses at once, you will get the each license for $49. With new cool features in 2.0, it is going to be the best choice for wireframing!

We are working on version 2.0 and it is time to give you some information about it. I will split it to a few articles. What can you expect in this part?

Not just a wireframing tool

We expand our wireframing tool with some new cool features. The biggest one is that Devhand SketchIt is going to support making of diagrams. They can be a great addition to wireframes. You can export them to image formats and they are independent on wireframes. This means that you will be able to use Devhand SketchIt in various situations and it will not be limited to wireframing only.

A lot of people ask me about Devhand SketchIt and about how it could be useful. I will try to summarize the main reasons why you should use a wireframing tool (especially Devhand SketchIt ). If you are a software developer, UI architect or webdesigner, you should be interested in this kind of a tool.

The development process of a software contains a few steps. You or your customer

have an idea,

you will create a specification,

build the architecture of software,

write some code,

test it,

write a documentation

and finally you will be able to use it.

Wireframing tools help you with the second step – creating of a specification. This step is probably the most important thing (OK, after having an idea). This point is the edge determining success or failure of your product.

Developers tend to skip this step and they like starting with the programming. It can work in small projects but it is very risky. Imagine you realize that some part of your product is supposed to work differently and you realize it after you spend three weeks on programming. It is kind of a nightmare, for you and especially for your customer.

The second option is to write a specification document and draw diagrams. It is better than nothing but if you send an eighty pages document to your customer, will somebody read it? Well, in most cases will not or at least not carefully.

So what is the best choice? Use Devhand SketchIt and create an interactive wireframe! A wireframe is something like “drawing” of a software product. You will specify where images, texts, buttons and other controls will be placed and what their behavior will be without writing of the code. You can just drag and drop controls on the canvas and assign actions to them with a few clicks.

Then you can test it and after you will find a place where it should work differently, you can change it immediately without reprogramming the whole application. Also your customer will be happy with this, you will fix all UI and behavior issues before you will write a single line of the code!

After the wireframe is approved, you will start programming. The wireframe will be a guide to how it is supposed to work. You and your team can click through it and check how something works without reading of long specification documents.

It is time to write some note about the new release. The new 1.8 version brings you important UI improvements and bug fixes.

Layers, layers, layers

The first thing you will notice is the new layers mini-panel on the top of the designer canvas. You can add new layers, switch them and toggle the preview mode on this panel now. It is really fast and you need no extra clicks. Other layers settings are in the right Layers tab, no changes here.

Bugs

This version fixes many small bugs, especially in the HTML exporting. There were issues with layer aligning and sizing, it is solved now. Another bug affected assigning of masters in some cases. Also fixed.

What’s new in this version? It fixes some bugs and adds one new feature.

The Wireframe Changelog

This new feature is pretty simple but very useful. You can log changes in your wireframes now. Maybe you know it, you work for a demanding customer and you change the wireframe every day. The wireframe changelog helps you to keep information about older versions of the wireframe in your project. The changelog can be exported to HTML with the wireframe. You don’t need to write a document in Notepad or Word!

Bug Fixes

Actually, there was one annoying bug which is fixed. Maybe you noticed that if you selected more controls with different formatting (the font family and size), the formatting was reset to values of the first control in the selection.

Also you can copy and paste controls between tabs without problems.

Download The New Version

Please note that older version of Devhand SketchIt won’t open dhsketch files saved in this version. Download the new version at the well-known link, it is a free update.

It is few days now I released the first public version of Devhand SketchIt. As you might see on its websites, it is a wireframing and prototyping tool. I started to work on it in September 2011. It is a long time but I hope it has been worth it because I have tried to implement features you will love!

Check this video out, it will show you the important parts of Devhand SketchIt: